Portfolio.hu reports that Hungarian President László Sólyom has set the date of Hungary's regularly scheduled parliamentary election to April 11 and 25. An election campaign is now underway in the Central European country, and recent polls indicate that Hungary's main opposition party, the right-of-center Fidesz remains set to score a landslide victory over the ruling, post-communist Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) - which has been in deep trouble for most of the past four years, as I've noted in my previous blog postings on Hungary over at Global Economy Matters (available here and here).

Hungary's 386-seat unicameral National Assembly is elected by one of the world's most complicated electoral systems, combining French-style runoff voting in single-member constituencies with regional-level party-list proportional representation and a cumbersome top-up national list that partially compensates parties for the disparities between votes and seats introduced by runoff voting at the constituency level and (to a lesser degree) PR at the county level. Nonetheless, if opinion poll figures hold, Fidesz's already enormous popular vote would in all likelihood translate into a parliamentary supermajority of two-thirds or more.

Ukraine will be holding a presidential runoff election on Sunday, February 7, 2010, and Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine has detailed results of the first round held last January 17, as well as results for the 2004 repeat presidential runoff and the Supreme Council elections of 2006 and 2007.

Note that 2010 election statistics were aggregated from polling station-level data published on Ukraine's Central Election Commission's 2010 presidential election website, which as of January 20 included invalid ballot and voter registration figures.

Chile and Ukraine are holding presidential elections today, in both instances under the runoff voting system. The vote in Ukraine is a first round in which no candidate is expected to win an outright majority, in whose case a runoff election among the top two candidates would be held next February 7. Meanwhile, Chile already held presidential and parliamentary elections last December 13, but no candidate secured an absolute majority in the presidential poll, and Chilean voters will choose today between the top two candidates in last December's first round, namely Sebastián Piñera Echenique of the center-right Coalition for Change and former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle of the center-left Concertación, which has ruled Chile since 1990.

Finally, I do not have an Ukraine page yet, butUkraine holds an early parliamentary election has a comprehensive review of political developments in Ukraine since the Eastern European country attained independence in 1991, up to their early parliamentary poll in 2007.

Update

Sebastián Piñera Echenique has been elected President of Chile. With nearly all polling stations tallied, Piñera narrowly prevailed over former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle by a margin of 51.6% to 48.4%.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's Central Election Commission website has live 2010 presidential election results here, in Ukrainian. Early figures have Viktor Yanukovych in first place but short of an absolute majority, with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko firmly in second place. As for incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko, he is currently trailing in a distant fifth (that's right, fifth) place.